RayCarsilloWrites.com

I pride myself on being able to find enjoyment from a ton of different gaming genres. Whether it’s shooters, fighting games, RPGs, or sports titles, you’ll likely find them somewhere in my collection. Sometimes, though, the genre that really gets me pumped up is a good old-fashioned puzzle-platformer. So, when a little passion project from longtime Nintendo developer HAL Laboratory named BoxBoy! found its way on to my 3DS, I was more than ready to give it a shot.

BoxBoy! stars a walking square named Qbby who must use his ability to make box-shaped extensions of himself to overcome nearly 200 different obstacle courses on the way to repairing his damaged homeworld. Qbby can make bridges to cross gaps, create shields to block lasers or spikes, or build makeshift stairs to reach higher areas.

Unfortunately, especially with the illustrious pedigree of HAL behind the game, I was surprised to find that BoxBoy! feels empty inside. I mean, sure, there’s technically a ton of content crammed in here: hundreds of stages, unlockable challenge levels, and a score-attack mode where you use Qbby’s powers to collect emblems. But by the time I’d reached the fourth world—or after less than an hour of playtime—I’d already grown bored.

You see, BoxBoy! does nothing to innovate on the puzzle-platformer. Admittedly, it’s not the worst thing in the world to use the same traps and gimmicks we’ve seen dozens of times before—teleporters, gravity fields, lasers, and spikes. Disappointingly, though, the game never pushes your cognitive process beyond using the same handful of box creations you learn at the beginning to overcome every situation, so the gameplay starts to feel very monotonous very quickly, even when new obstacles are introduced.

BoxBoy! doesn’t offer any depth-of-field puzzles, since the game isn’t compatible with the 3DS’ 3D feature—it’s a wholly 2D world. The game doesn’t even include any physics-based puzzles. Every time I thought I might be able to use something like momentum to get through a puzzle or place a box where I needed it to be, it would almost immediately sink down in a straight line, like throwing a crumpled-up piece of paper instead of an object that actually had some weight to it.

Eighty percent of the game just feels like HAL got into a “rinse and repeat” mindset with the stage design until they got close to a triple-digit number. Each new level introduces a new impediment, but often instead of combining them with ones seen in previous levels, you only have to bypass the latest one. This fact only compounds the monotony since it feels like you’re you’re playing the same puzzle a handful of times before being allowed to progress to the next one. The stages work, but there’s nothing truly interesting about a single one.

At least until you get close to the end of the game, that is. At that point, there’s a drastic spike in difficulty that makes the last two levels boring and hard. It’s not that I couldn’t overcome them, but after walking through the previous 15 stages like they were nothing, this sudden change of pace was jarring—and not in a good way, considering how ill prepared I felt at first.

And one would think that part of the reason BoxBoy! has such a simple motif—black-and-white settings and characters, with every object in the world including a right angle—that HAL would’ve crafted more inventive puzzles to take advantage of this and defend the decision to keep the look so modest. But everything about BoxBoy! just feels bare bones.

I honestly can’t recommend BoxBoy! even for someone who loves puzzle-platformers. There’s a clear lack of creativity here, whether it’s the art style, story (or lack thereof), gameplay, or level design. I kept wondering when the game would finally start to pick up—and then, before I knew it, it was already over, with the entire experience clocking in at only a few hours. I suppose I should be thankful it only took one sitting to beat and didn’t consume more of my time, because almost from the start, BoxBoy! felt like a waste of it.